Business Posts

If top-tier cloud providers use similar network hardware in their data centers and connect to the same transit and peering bandwidth providers, how can SoftLayer claim to provide the best network performance in the cloud computing industry?

Over the years, I've heard variations of that question asked dozens of times, and it's fairly easy to answer with impressive facts and figures. All SoftLayer data centers and network points of presence (PoPs) are connected to our unique global network backbone, which carries public, private, and management traffic to and from servers. Using our network connectivity table, some back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that we have more than 2,500Gbps of bandwidth connectivity with some of the largest transit and peering bandwidth providers in the world (and that total doesn't even include the private peering relationships we have with other providers in various regional markets). Additionally, customers may order servers with up to 10Gbps network ports in our data centers.

For the most part, those stats explain our differentiation, but part of the bigger network performance story is still missing, and to a certain extent it has been untold—until today.

The 2,500+Gbps of bandwidth connectivity we break out in the network connectivity table only accounts for the on-ramps and off-ramps of our network. Our global network backbone is actually made up of an additional 2,600+Gbps of bandwidth connectivity ... and all of that backbone connectivity transports SoftLayer-related traffic.

This robust network architecture streamlines the access to and delivery of data on SoftLayer servers. When you access a SoftLayer server, the network is designed to bring you onto our global backbone as quickly as possible at one of our network PoPs, and when you're on our global backbone, you'll experience fewer hops (and a more direct route that we control). When one of your users requests data from your SoftLayer server, that data travels across the global backbone to the nearest network PoP, where it is handed off to another provider to carry the data the "last mile."

With this controlled environment, I decided to undertake an impromptu science experiment to demonstrate how location and physical distance affect network performance in the cloud.

Speed Testing on the SoftLayer Global Network Backbone

I work in the SoftLayer office in downtown Houston, Texas. In network-speak, this location is HOU04. You won't find that location on any data center or network tables because it's just an office, but it's connected to the same global backbone as our data centers and network points of presence. From my office, the "last mile" doesn't exist; when I access a SoftLayer server, my bits and bytes only travel across the SoftLayer network, so we're effectively cutting out a number of uncontrollable variables in the process of running network speed tests.

For better or worse, I didn't tell any network engineers that I planned to run speed tests to every available data center and share the results I found, so you're seeing exactly what I saw with no tomfoolery. I just fired up my browser, headed to our Data Centers page, and made my way down the list using the SpeedTest option for each facility. Customers often go through this process when trying to determine the latency, speeds, and network path that they can expect from servers in each data center, but if we look at the results collectively, we can learn a lot more about network performance in general.

With the results, we'll discuss how network speed tests work, what the results mean, and why some might be surprising. If you're feeling scientific and want to run the tests yourself, you're more than welcome to do so.

The Ookla SpeedTests we link to from the data centers table measured the latency (ping time), jitter (variation in latency), download speeds, and upload speeds between the user's computer and the data center's test server. To run this experiment, I connected my MacBook Pro via Ethernet to a 100Mbps wired connection. At the end of each speed test, I took a screenshot of the performance stats:

To save you the trouble of trying to read all of the stats on each data center as they cycle through that animated GIF, I also put them into a table (click the data center name to see its results screenshot in a new window):

By performing these speed tests on the SoftLayer network, we can actually learn a lot about how speed tests work and how physical location affects network performance. But before we get into that, let's take note of a few interesting results from the table above:

The lowest latency from my office is to the HOU02 (Houston, Texas) data center. That data center is about 14.2 miles away as the crow flies.

The highest latency results from my office are to the SYD01 (Sydney, Australia) and SNG01 (Singapore) data centers. Those data centers are at least 8,600 and 10,000 miles away, respectively.

The fastest download speed observed is 93.16Mbps, and that number was seen from two data centers: DAL01 and DAL05.

The slowest download speed observed is 40.35Mbps from SNG01.

The fastest upload speed observed is 87.43Mbps to DAL01.

The slowest upload speed observed is 72.35Mbps to SNG01.

The upload speeds observed are faster than the download speeds from every data center outside of North America.

Are you surprised that we didn't see any results closer to 100Mbps? Is our server in Singapore underperforming? Are servers outside of North America more selfish to receive data and stingy to give it back?

Those are great questions, and they actually jumpstart an explanation of how the network tests work and what they're telling us.

Maximum Download Speed on 100Mbps Connection

If my office is 2 milliseconds from the test server in HOU02, why is my download speed only 93.12Mbps? To answer this question, we need to understand that to perform these tests, a connection is made using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to move the data, and TCP does a lot of work in the background. The download is broken into a number of tiny chunks called packets and sent from the sender to the receiver. TCP wants to ensure that each packet that is sent is received, so the receiver sends an acknowledgement back to the sender to confirm that the packet arrived. If the sender is unable to verify that a given packet was successfully delivered to the receiver, the sender will resend the packet.

This system is pretty simple, but in actuality, it's very dynamic. TCP wants to be as efficient as possible ... to send the fewest number of packets to get the entire message across. To accomplish this, TCP is able to modify the size of each packet to optimize it for each communication. The receiver dictates how large the packet should be by providing a receive window to accommodate a small packet size, and it analyzes and adjusts the receive window to get the largest packets possible without becoming unstable. Some operating systems are better than others when it comes to tweaking and optimizing TCP transfer rates, but the processes TCP takes to ensure that the packets are sent and received without error takes overhead, and that overhead limits the maximum speed we can achieve.

Understanding the SNG01 Results

Why did my SNG01 speed test max out at a meager 40.35Mbps on my 100Mbps connection? Well, now that we understand how TCP is working behind the scenes, we can see why our download speeds from Singapore are lower than we'd expect. Latency between the sending and successful receipt of a packet plays into TCP’s considerations of a stable connection. Higher ping times will cause TCP to send smaller packet sizes than it would for lower ping times to ensure that no sizable packet is lost (which would have to be reproduced and resent).

With our global backbone optimizing the network path of the packets between Houston and Singapore, the more than 10,000-mile journey, the nature of TCP, and my computer's TCP receive window adjustments all factor into the download speeds recorded from SNG01. Looking at the results in the context of the distance the data has to travel, our results are actually well within the expected performance.

Because the default behavior of TCP is partially to blame for the results, we could actually tweak the test and tune our configurations to deliver faster speeds. To confirm that improvements can be made relatively easily, we can actually just look at the answer to our third question...

Upload > Download?

Why are the upload speeds faster than the download speeds after latency jumps from 50ms to 114ms? Every location in North America is within 2,000 miles of Houston, while the closest location outside of North America is about 5,000 miles away. With what we've learned about how TCP and physical distance play into download speeds, that jump in distance explains why the download speeds drop from 90.33Mbps to 77.41Mbps as soon as we cross an ocean, but how can the upload speeds to Europe (and even APAC) stay on par with their North American counterparts? The only difference between our download path and upload path is which side is sending and which side is receiving. And if the receiver determines the size of the TCP receive window, the most likely culprit in the discrepancy between download and upload speeds is TCP windowing.

A Linux server is built and optimized to be a server, whereas my MacOSX laptop has a lot of other responsibilities, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the default TCP receive window handling is better on the server side. With changes to the way my laptop handles TCP, download speeds would likely be improved significantly. Additionally, if we wanted to push the envelope even further, we might consider using a different transfer protocol to take advantage of the consistent, controlled network environment.

The Importance of Physical Location in Cloud Computing

These real-world test results under controlled conditions demonstrate the significance of data's geographic proximity to its user on the user's perceived network performance. We know that the network latency in a 14-mile trip will be lower than the latency in a 10,000-mile trip, but we often don't think about the ripple effect latency has on other network performance indicators. And this experiment actually controls a lot of other variables that can exacerbate the performance impact of geographic distance. The tests were run on a 100Mbps connection because that's a pretty common maximum port speed, but if we ran the same tests on a GigE line, the difference would be even more dramatic. Proof: HOU02 @ 1Gbps v. SNG01 @ 1Gbps

Let's apply our experiment to a real-world example: Half of our site's user base is in Paris and the other half is in Singapore. If we chose to host our cloud infrastructure exclusively from Paris, our users would see dramatically different results. Users in Paris would have sub-10ms latency while users in Singapore have about 300ms of latency. Obviously, operating cloud servers in both markets would be the best way to ensure peak performance in both locations, but what if you can only afford to provision your cloud infrastructure in one location? Where would you choose to provision that infrastructure to provide a consistent user experience for your audience in both markets?

Given what we've learned, we should probably choose a location with roughly the same latency to both markets. We can use the SoftLayer Looking Glass to see that San Jose, California (SJC01) would be a logical midpoint ... At this second, the latency between SJC and PAR on the SoftLayer backbone is 149ms, and the latency between SJC and SNG is 162ms, so both would experience very similar performance (all else being equal). Our users in the two markets won't experience mind-blowing speeds, but neither will experience mind-numbing speeds either.

The network performance implications of physical distance apply to all cloud providers, but because of the SoftLayer global network backbone, we're able to control many of the variables that lead to higher (or inconsistent) latency to and from a given data center. The longer a single provider can route traffic, the more efficiently that traffic will move. You might see the same latency speeds to another provider's cloud infrastructure from a given location at a given time across the public Internet, but you certainly won't see the same consistency from all locations at all times. SoftLayer has spent millions of dollars to build, maintain, and grow our global network backbone to transport public and private network traffic, and as a result, we feel pretty good about claiming to provide the best network performance in cloud computing.

In this interview, SoftLayer’s community development lead in Canada, Qasim Virjee, sits down with Marcus Daniels, the co-founder and CEO of HIGHLINE, a venture-backed accelerator based in Vancouver and Toronto.

QV: Y Combinator has become an assumed standard for accelerators by creating its own business model. What do you think is both good and bad about this?

MD: Y Combinator (YC) not only created a new model for funding tech startups, but it also evolved the whole category. Historically, I like to think that Bill Gross's Idealab represented accelerator/incubator 1.0 and YC evolved that to 2.0 over the past decade, resulting in a hit parade of meaningful startups that are changing the world.

The good is that YC has created a “high quality” bar and led the standardization of micro-seed investment docs for the betterment of the whole startup ecosystem. It proved the model and has helped hundreds of amazing founders with venture profile businesses that are changing the world.

The bad is that there are now thousands of accelerators/incubators globally running generic programs that don't help founders much. More than half have a horrible rate helping startups raise follow-on capital and almost all never had a single exit from a startup they invested in.

HIGHLINE has a strong track record in our short history and now sees a big opportunity to be amongst the leaders in the evolution of the accelerator industry.

QV: Many accelerators focus on streamlining a program to process cohorts of companies at regular intervals throughout the year, every year. Often, the high throughput these programs expect means they must select companies from applications, rather than the approach you seem to be taking. Can you explain how HIGHLINE is sourcing companies for investment?

MD: HIGHLINE gets over 800 applications a year and targets about 20–30 investments during that time. Out of our last 12 investments, all had either come from referral partners or the team hunting the best founders to be part of our portfolio. Over the years, we have moved from the ideation stage, which comprises the majority of inbound applications, to the MVP in market stage, which is our sweet spot now. We will also focus on low-volume, high-touch advisory support, which is why a lot of time is spent building relationships with founders and adding value to MVP-stage startups before investing helps curate better deals.

QV: Traditionally, investment vehicles (such as VC firms and accelerator programs) have been run by financial industry types, but it seems that you are taking a more entrepreneurial approach with HIGHLINE and constantly evolving your business model. What can you tell me about this?

MD: The best accelerator leaders globally are past entrepreneurs who have some investment experience given how hands-on you have to be with the companies. Without the experience of starting and growing ventures, it is really hard to help tech founders navigate the daily challenges. Also, the best founders get to choose, and they want to work with other top founders in a long-term mentor/advisory/coaching relationship.

QV: How does being “VC-backed” differentiate HIGHLINE from other accelerators?

MD: Having several VCs as investors, such as the BDC and Relay Ventures, gives us an edge in several ways. Firstly, they are not only a great quality referral network for deals, but also a huge help in getting our companies venture-ready—even if they may not invest directly. Secondly, they allow us to internally focus on a specialization in helping venture profile businesses raise follow-on capital, as opposed to the glut of programs that are optimized for entrepreneurial education and lifestyle job creation. Lastly, they put big pressure on the whole HIGHLINE team to both get results for shareholders and build something unique that can be a category leader over the next decade.

QV: Our country is physically large and this seems to have created differentiated tech startup scenes between its cities. How does HIGHLINE collapse the geographic divide by having a physical presence in both Vancouver and Toronto?

MD: HIGHLINE tries to curate and unite the best digital founders, institutional investors, and ecosystem partners across Canada. We position our offices in both Vancouver and Toronto as portfolio hubs for founders who want to be headquartered in Canada, but want to take on the world. Most importantly, we spend time in all major Canadian startup ecosystems and have plans for unique events to bring our curated community closer together.

Building and deploying applications on SoftLayer with Bluemix, IBM’s Platform as a Service (PaaS), just got a whole lot more powerful. At IBM’s Interconnect, we announced a beta service for deploying OpenStack-based virtual servers within Bluemix. Obviously, the new service is exciting because it brings together the scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure from SoftLayer with the open, standards-based cloud management platform of OpenStack. But making the new service available via Bluemix presents a particularly unique set of opportunities.

Now Bluemix developers can deploy OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer or their own private OpenStack cloud in a consistent, developer-friendly manner. Without changing your code, your configuration, or your deployment method, you can launch your application to a local OpenStack cloud on your premises, a private OpenStack cloud you have deployed on SoftLayer bare metal servers, or to SoftLayer virtual servers within Bluemix. For instance, you could instantly fire up a few OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer to test out your new application. After you have impressed your clients and fully tested everything, you could deploy that application to a local OpenStack cloud in your own data center ̶all from within Bluemix. With Bluemix providing the ability to deploy applications across cloud deployment models, developers can create an infrastructure configuration once and deploy consistently, regardless of the stage of their application development life cycle.

OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer enable you to manage all of your virtual servers through standard OpenStack APIs and user interfaces, and leverage the tooling, knowledge and process you or your organization have already built out. So the choice is yours: you may fully manage your virtual servers directly from within the Bluemix user interface or choose standard OpenStack interface options such as the Horizon management portal, the OpenStack API or the OpenStack command line interface. For clients who are looking for enterprise-class infrastructure as a service but also wish to avoid getting locked in a vendor’s proprietary interface, our new OpenStack standard access provides clients a new choice.

Providing OpenStack-based virtual servers is just one more (albeit major) step toward our goal of providing even more OpenStack integration with SoftLayer services. For clients looking for enterprise-class Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) available globally and accessible via standard OpenStack interfaces, OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer provide just what they are looking for.

The beta is open now for you to test deploying and running servers on the new SoftLayer OpenStack public cloud service through Bluemix. You can sign up for a Bluemix 30-day free trial.

This year IBM is taking three amazing conferences and merging them into IBM InterConnect. With all the activity going on over the five days, the search for SoftLayer can be a serious undertaking. So spend more time enjoying the conference and less time flipping through your event guide. Here’s a rundown of everything you need to know to keep up with us.

SLayer Sessions at IBM InterConnect

SLayers are leading sessions all over InterConnect. We've cut out all the noise so it’s easy for you to slip our sessions into your conference agenda. What do you need to know? You’ll find it here.

dev@InterConnect

If you’re looking for developer-focused topics within IBM Interconnect, we’ve got you covered. dev@InterConnect is a developer’s two-day dreamland—from a slate of developer-focused sessions to firsthand training, and even a Developer Playground where you’ll get to play with some of the hottest tech toys. As an added bonus, you will find the Server Challenge there too. Try your hand at re-racking the servers and plugging in the cables—fastest time wins a MacBook Air.

End dev@InterConnect with a bang at the Gaming Bash we are sponsoring with Cloudant. Join us for bites, beverages, and be ready to game. Prizes and swag will be up for grabs; you just have to put your skills to the test.

IBM Cloud Experience Zone

If you find yourself with some free time at Mandalay Bay, swing into the Solution EXPO and make a b-line for the IBM Cloud Experience Zone. That’s where you’ll find your resource for all things SoftLayer. If you have questions about SoftLayer, our SLayers will be there to answer them. If you just want to see what we’re all about, we’ll be there running live demos.

Rock @ IBM InterConnect

After a packed conference, we hope you’ll be ready to rock! IBM InterConnect and Rocket are giving attendees a VIP worthy event with a performance from Aerosmith.

Go to the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Wednesday evening to party from 7:45–10:30pm. The event is included for InterConnect and dev@InterConnect attendees. Just don’t forget to bring your badge; it’s your ticket in!

Editor’s Note: Each month in 2015, we’ll be celebrating the cornucopia of reasons why the cloud reigns supreme — from customer tales to cloud insights and everything in between. During February, the notorious month of love, we’re showing you exactly why we heart the cloud. Follow all the fun on your favorite social networks by keeping tabs on #SLCloudLove.

Clicking Add to Cart—that’s how I like to shop these days. Brick and mortar shopping might be retail therapy, but the convenience and online discounts at my fingertips appeases my inherently lazy human tendencies.

With more and more online e-stores cropping up, physical retail outlets can no longer ignore not having an online presence, including a mobile-friendly website and ordering system. The numbers say it all:

e-Commerce sales are expected to be more than $1.7 trillion with mobile commerce accounting for nearly $300 billion in sales. Read more here.

In India, the e-commerce market is expected to reach $6 billion in 2015—a 70 percent increase over 2014. Read more here.

The Chinese government is allowing foreign-owned e-commerce companies to operate in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone as part of a pilot program; the market is expected to see a lot of inflow despite tough competition from local giants like JD.com and Alibaba. Read more here.

The six largest Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) reached $7 billion in total revenues in 2013 and will grow at a CAGR of 37.6 percent to reach $34.5 billion by 2018. Read more here.

So when I recently attended the iMedia Online Retail Summit, I jumped at the chance to discuss with the audience the benefits of moving their e-Commerce business to the cloud as well as discussing some very interesting stories about e-commerce platforms based in Asia.

Here is a quick overview of the presentation:

e-Commerce on Cloud
There is no denying the high reliance on IT. e-Commerce portals need to handle a rising number of Internet users, provide a secure and convenient online payment system, and support lucrative offers by e-tailors. The problem is that the utilization is unpredictable (except holiday season when it is predictably unpredictable!). If your site slows or freezes, especially during a sale, it can be compared to shutting your store on Black Friday. Customers will abandon their carts, and the social media sites will erupt with negative remarks—recall the recent headliner, Flipkart faces social media backlash over ‘crashes’, ‘misleading’ pricing.

The dilemma: Over-allocate and over-pay for unused resources just to manage sudden shopping spurts, or under-allocate resources and suffer the wrath of the new-age shopper. Cloud resources seems like a natural solution when you don’t want to be stuck in the either-or situation. But, not just any cloud solution will do. If a provider has a lock-in period or contract (even if it’s short-term)—well that's not really cloud, now is it?

Similarly the cloud solution is not justifying your investments if it is going to charge you every time you, as an internal user, try to move your virtual servers across your operating geos to get closer to customers. For example: your next online sale is targeted at holiday shoppers in Singapore or you want to carry out test runs for your Amsterdam customer base, but your core virtual server originally resides in Melbourne.

Solving e-Commerce Challenges with SoftLayer
I like using this image as it gives a great view into how SoftLayer can help e-commerce and e-tail customers manage day-to-day scenarios. From seasonal site traffic spikes to needing backup solutions for business continuity, SoftLayer has a solution for it. Plus SoftLayer brings advantages gleaned from working with e-commerce giants over the past decade.

Walking the Talk—Businesses that are Leveraging Cloud . . . Successfully!
In October 2014, Natali Ardianto, Tiket.com's CTO, gave a keynote address at Cloud Expo Asia about building one of Indonesia’s largest online travel and entertainment portals. When it first launched a few years ago, Tiket.com faced TCP, DoS, and DDoS attacks while hosting unsuccessfully on two different IaaS providers. The company needed a highly stable infrastructure delivering consistent performance and reliable support to ensure site uptime and a smooth end-user experience. Tiket.com chose SoftLayer to support its site. Running on SoftLayer bare metal servers, Tiket.com systems are now able to handle more than 300 API requests per minute and has experienced a 75 percent cost savings. Watch Natali's video where he discusses his cloud experience, or read the detailed case study.

HotelsCombined.com is an impressive collection of over 5 million real-time international hotel deals, a database of more than 800,000 properties and an affiliate base of over 20,000 companies. The company uses a combination of SoftLayer bare metal and virtual servers, load balancers, and redundant iSCSI storage. This provides the company with several thousand cores of processing power and enables it to remain lean and move quickly. The company also uses the SoftLayer infrastructure to provide real-time predictive models to the website and to support its business intelligence tools. Read the detailed case study.

While at the conference, I met up with a great bunch of entrepreneurs, startups and giants from across Asia. It was amazing to hear about the journey and growth plans of Rakuten, Life Project, Qoo10, Telunjuk, Seroyamart.com, and many more. Keep your ears open this coming year. The e-commerce landscape is rapidly progressing and these guys are weaving the fabric.

Developers, if you'd prefer to focus on building new applications instead of customizing your own unique cloud infrastructure, IBM Bluemix provides building blocks to rapidly develop and deploy applications on the Platform as a Service (PaaS) level to make life easier for you. It’s an ecosystem of services based on Cloud Foundry, an open source project designed to make deploying and scaling an application as simple as possible. Leveraging an existing project like this is a large part of what makes Bluemix so easy to use.

Bluemix integrates with Jazz, IBM’s DevOps service, to help manage code, plan versions and release, and actually push code to production. You can still use it with your github projects, so no worries there.

And as a SoftLayer customer (or potential customer), you can rest assured that Bluemix projects can run on SoftLayer’s hardware and network.

Core Ideas

The Application

This is your code. Bluemix comes with a number of predefined buildpacks to get your language of choice up and running quickly, but you will still need to actually develop your application. Bluemix hasn’t solved that problem yet.

Buildpacks

A buildpack is a collection of scripts designed to set up your container and all of the application dependencies. If Bluemix doesn’t have a buildpack that suits your needs, you can always create your own. Extending a buildpack is pretty easy. Simply clone an existing one to use as a base, make your changes, commit it to your github repo, and then tell Bluemix about it so it can build your application properly.

Services

Bluemix has a long list of services you can bind to your application. Instead of making a MySQL server yourself, you can just bind the MySQL service to your application and start coding. Along with many of the standard services expected from a CloudFoundry project, there are also some IBM specific ones, like Watson as a service. While I haven’t had the time to learn about Watson personally, everyone I talk to says it’s a rather neat thing to have on your application.

Getting Started

I recommend reading this tutorial which will get you to a nice “hello world” application. Overall I found that going from “I have no idea what Bluemix is” to “I’ve created my own Bluemix application!” to be a rather pleasant experience.

Creating your first Bluemix project is only a few clicks away. A Bluemix 30 day free trial should give you plenty of time to get an idea if Bluemix is the right fit for you.

Bluemix is absolutely worth checking out. So, what are you waiting for? Give it a go!

As 2014 draws to an end, so does the nine-city SoftLayer Asia Roadshow. We concluded our GCG chapter in Taipei on December 18, and I was thrilled to see guests coming to our customer meetups and workshops to learn and share experiences. This tour has helped us get closer to our clients and get a better understanding of the local market challenges and expectations.

Mic Kwok and William Lim, our in-house experts and local leads for the Roadshow in GCG, presented and shared unique SoftLayer solutions and advantages and industry success stories with start-ups, developers, and entrepreneurs. They also led interactive sessions where we had in-depth conversations, like the Bare-feet, Bare Metal workshop held at PicCollage.

We’d like to send a great big shout out to the speakers and our attendees for making the event such a success.

I had a chance to talk to iTaiwan Consultancy and Herxun Inc. during the workshop and customer meetups. It was great to hear positive feedback on the SoftLayer Roadshow initiative and SoftLayer services.

“[SoftLayer's] monthly bandwidth package provides us with more buffer to deal with potential DDoS attacks. Unlike other cloud solution providers, SoftLayer charges a standard monthly fee without additional bandwidth usage billing. This eliminates unexpected bandwidth charges when a hacking situation arises. I chose SoftLayer for a client of mine who’s a famous local opinion leader to prevent unexpected billing if any hacking.”
–Tommy Lee, Founder of iTaiwan Consultancy Co., Ltd

“SoftLayer data center service, charged by hour, pay by usage, is a great option for start-ups! With [SoftLayer’s] flexible solutions, it allows us to test in all sorts of creative formats, which accelerates time to market of our new product/services.”
– Brian Chen, CEO and Co-Founder of Herxun Inc.

While in Taipei, we also met with local start-ups and SMBs at the Asia BEAT 2014. SoftLayer’s Allen Poon, Angus Ip and William Lim held a dedicated workshop for the event attendees. What stood out for us was the deep-dive discussions and cross-questioning from the attendees that made the session so much livelier.

Although it was a fun and stressful couple of months of planning and executing, time flew by. While I am looking forward to recharging over the holidays, I am also super pumped for 2015. As you have probably heard, we launched three new data centers (Tokyo, Mexico City, and Frankfurt) in December with more to come in 2015. And there are a lot of new activities planned in the new year, especially in Greater China, so stay tuned!

‘Til then, wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a new year full of peace and happiness!

As 2014 comes to a close, we’re reflecting on another exciting year: our proudest moments, smartest innovations, and continued growth. It’s been an incredible year being part of IBM, and we continue to broaden our reach while adding new capabilities to our portfolio of cloud services.

SoftLayer’s IaaS platform has become the centerpiece of IBM’s cloud portfolio, providing a scalable, secure base for the global delivery of IBM’s cloud services, spanning extensive middleware and SaaS solutions. IBM has either built or bought 100 cloud properties over the last five years, and SoftLayer is the foundation or the piece that brings it all together.

Expanding our Global Footprint
In January, IBM announced its $1.2 billion commitment to expand its global cloud footprint, including plans to open 15 new SoftLayer data centers. Our first data center to open in 2014 was in Hong Kong, followed by London, Toronto, Melbourne, and Paris, with more to follow. We also launched two data centers for U.S. government workloads in Ashburn, Virginia and one in Dallas, Texas. These data centers are reserved for government customers and will be certified for U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliance.

With our new international facilities, we’ve tripled our footprint in Europe and Asia. Expanding our physical presence in these geographies gives our customers SoftLayer solutions for workloads and data that need to remain local, while providing additional data redundancy options within key regions around the world. With our data centers and points of presence (PoPs) combined, SoftLayer is on track for world domination.

Hourly Bare Metal
Our bare metal cloud differentiates us by providing an ideal solution for the toughest workloads in the cloud, including big data and analytics that require high performance. For more than 10 years, we’ve been refining, pioneering, and innovating our bare metal cloud. This year we unveiled a new offering: new bare metal servers that are deployed in less than 30 minutes and billed by the hour. These hourly bare metal servers provide the raw performance of physical servers with shorter commitments, making it easier than ever to deploy computing-intensive workloads on SoftLayer at will.

Growth
In 2014, we’ve continued to experience incredible growth. Since being acquired by IBM, SoftLayer has added thousands of new customers at an average rate of 1,000 new accounts per month. To match our aggressive business growth, our employee base is expanding as well.

“We expected to almost double this year, and to almost double again next year," said SoftLayer COO Francisco Romero. “In Dallas, SoftLayer expects to hire workers to fill 250 new jobs by the end of 2015.”

In order to accommodate our growing employee population, we’ll be relocating our Dallas headquarters to a new space early next year.

We look forward to serving you from our new address, 14001 North Dallas Parkway.

IBM will be lighting up Las Vegas next week with Insight 2014, the conference for big data and analytics. Starting this Sunday and running through Thursday, October 30 at the Mandalay Bay, this show will offer amazing opportunities to learn more about the advantages of delivering big data and analytics services, and many of those advantages involve the SoftLayer cloud platform.

To guide you through the 700+ sessions and streams easier, we’ve compiled a list of must-attend SoftLayer- and cloud-based sessions.

SXSW 2014 was bigger and crazier than ever. For anyone who has been sleeping under a rock, SXSW is one of the largest, most intense start-up technology, music, and film festivals on the planet. Held in March, SXSW turns Austin, Texas, into the global epicenter of everything (startup) technology.

As in years past, SoftLayer hosted the Speakeasy lounge, a daytime co-working space and community/networking lounge in the evening. For the second straight year, the lounge blew our expectations out of the water. Over the course of 48 hours, we saw over a thousand partners, start-up clients, fellow colleagues, and members of the global start-up community come through the doors. To give you an idea of how “global” the community was, I walked through the lounge at one point and heard six different languages being spoken.

Our start-up partners used the lounge to escape the chaos of the festival so they could get work done. In the space, they could relax, send emails, connect with clients and friends, or just find some peace and quiet away from the cacophonous show floor (and even-noisier 6th Street).

One of the biggest highlights at SXSW for the Catalyst team was a panel that I moderated about building meaningful, organic communities around brands. The panelists for this discussion were George Karidis, COO of SoftLayer; Ben Rigby, CEO of Sparked; Samar Birwadker, CEO of Good.co; and Justin Johnson, director of developer evangelism for Keen.io. The group explained how their brands’ approaches to community engagement helped them build momentum and succeed faster, and I was humbled to hear how the SoftLayer Catalyst program impacted their decisions shaping their own communities. To cap off the session, the panelists also brought up the benefits of using Catalyst for testing and scaling during their early stages, so they could understand how to use the infrastructure as they grew. You need look no further for validation of our model than to have three of our most successful clients attributing their success to it.

In addition to the Speakeasy and the panel discussion, SoftLayer was also well represented on the SXSW show floor. Over the course of the show, clients, partners, and prospects stopped by to try their hands at the Server Challenge, and we had some phenomenal conversations about the future of the cloud and how SoftLayer is forging a new path in the infrastructure as a service game.

What a lot of people don’t realize about SXSW is that the majority of business gets done outside of the show floor. Each night presents opportunities to connect with and learn about individuals in the global start-up community. For example, Catalyst partner Planwise held a party and barbecue where they discussed best practices for start-ups in financial technology. We got in on the fun as well when we partnered with Techstars to host one of the hottest parties at SXSW Interactive. DJed by Thievery Corporation and attended by over a thousand guests, if you managed to get a hard-to-come-by ticket, you had a great time and met a lot of amazing people.

Over the years, SXSW has proven to be a melting pot for creativity and innovation on a global scale. As businesses look for new ways to gather and present information, providers like SoftLayer become an integral part of their approaches. Our goal with Catalyst is to stay front-and-center in the startup movement … So it’s a safe bet that you’ll see us again at SXSW 2015.